Since its launch on February 14, the BOAI has attracted participants and
press attention. Over 1,000 individuals and several dozen organizations
have signed on during the last week. It's especially gratifying to see
among the institutional signatories a growing number of journals, library
consortia, and universities. Some of the new names are the Library of
Congress, the Association of Research Libraries, the Canadian Association of
Research Libraries, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Australian Vice
Chancellors Committee.

Remember that you can help the cause by signing the online document,
persuading your institution to sign it, and spreading the word. We've also
written a good-sized list of specific actions that people can take depending on
their position --researchers, librarians, editors, publishers, or
representatives of universities, foundations, professional societies, or
governments.

This week we've also added French and German translations of the BOAI
documents.

(This is a radio interview of me. I'm happy with all of it except the
way it ends. Gordon closes with the remark that priced journals justify
themselves by their role in providing peer review. Period. I didn't
get to reply. So he leaves the false impression that BOAI doesn't endorse
peer review, doesn't know it costs money, or doesn't have a way to cover the
costs. To see how I would have replied, see the BOAI FAQ on these points,
above.)

(This is a wide-ranging interview of me on FOS issues in which Vaknin let
me give long answers and his editor didn't cut anything. I thank them
both. BOAI comes up in Part II.)

----------

Introduction to HINARI

HINARI is a major FOS initiative launched by the World Health Organization
(WHO) and the Open Society Institute (OSI) and now administered by WHO with
support from the BMJ and Yale University Library. The name stands for
Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative. Under the program, the
world's six largest publishers of biomedical journals have agreed to
three-tiered pricing. For countries in the lowest tier (GNP per capita
below $1k), online subscriptions are free of charge. For countries in the
middle tier (GNP per capita between $1k and $3k), online subscriptions will be
discounted by an amount to be decided this June. Countries in the top tier
pay full price. While HINARI has been on the drawing boards since last
spring, it just started delivering free online content to bottom tier countries
on January 31.

The subscriptions are given to universities and research institutions, not
to individuals. But they are identical in scope to the subscriptions
received by institutions paying the full price.

WHO estimates that there are 500 eligible institutions worldwide in the
bottom tier, of which 400 have so far been invited to participate and 100 have
already signed up. WHO expects that 200-250 will be signed up by the end
of the year. Progress is slowed chiefly by the lack of connectivity, or
its high cost, in the areas of greatest need. WHO also estimates that
there are 500 eligible institutions in the middle tier, though concentrated in
only half as many countries.

The publishers have signed on for 3-5 years under the current terms.
The program might be affected by changes in technology, publishing, development,
or world events. However, now that a policy framework has been erected, it
seems likely that the publishers will continue the program as long as it is
needed.

In March, more publishers will join the original six. In June, the
participating publishers will announce the discount offered to the middle
tier. By the end of this year, WHO hopes to include all the world's
biomedical journals in the program. Delivery to middle tier countries
should start in January 2003. After that, HINARI might generalize beyond
the biomedical fields.

The origin of HINARI can be traced to many sources. One is Kofi
Annan's Millennium Report and its accompanying UN initiatives to provide
connectivity, content, and training to bridge the digital divide in developing
countries. Another is an April 2000 meeting on FOS policy sponsored by WHO
at which there were speakers from BMJ and OSI. Another is the editorial
for September 30, 2000, by the editors of BioMed Central, BMJ, and the Lancet
(and published simultaneously in all three journals) recommending free
subscriptions to biomedical journals for developing countries. Another
might have been Elsevier CEO Derk Haank's speech at UNESCO's Paris Headquarters
on February 2, 2001, urging fellow journal publishers to consider tiered pricing
with the bottom tier free of charge.

[I thank Barbara Aronson at WHO for sharing information with me by
telephone and email.]

In the last month, three major FOS initiatives were launched at one week
intervals. On January 31, HINARI began delivering free content to research
institutions in the developing world (story above). On February 6, eight
major research library organizations representing 600 research libraries
worldwide announced the creation of the pro-FOS International Scholarly
Communications Alliance (FOSN for 2/14/02). On February 14, the Budapest
Open Access Initiative began its project to expand self-archiving, create
open-access journals, and recruit foundations beyond the founding Open Society
Institute to help to pay the costs of the transition to open-access science and
scholarship (FOSN for 2/14/02).

During the same period a couple of other large initiatives were announced
for future launch. The Alliance for Cellular Signaling is the largest FOS
experiment yet from _Nature_ (FOSN for 2/14/02). Lawrence Lessig announced
the Creative Commons, an organization that will offer free, flexible
intellectual property licenses that will simultaneously protect authors and
promote open online sharing (FOSN for 2/14/02).

In the previous month, SciDev was launched (FOSN for 1/23/02), BioMed
Central implemented its funding model to cover the costs of free online access
(FOSN for 1/1/02), and the French Académie des Sciences issued a public
statement calling on the European Commission not to apply ordinary copyright
rules to scientific publications whose authors do not demand payment (FOSN for
2/14/02).

We could consider the recent convergence of FOS initiatives a statistical
fluke. If you wait long enough a coin will come up heads 100 times in a
row. But this view of it ignores recent history, which shows a steadily
growing number of initiatives, experiments, articles, and endorsements of
FOS. This is not so much a fluke as a trajectory that suggests growing
recognition of the desirability and feasibility of FOS.

* Postscript. This week I wrote the first draft of Timeline of the
FOS Movement. I wanted to embed this convergence of FOS initiatives in
some recent history, see the local trajectory and test for randomness.
Have a look. Let me know what you think belongs on such a list.

The Supreme Court announced last week that it will hear the Eric Eldred
case during its coming term. Eldred is challenging the constitutionality
of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which retroactively
added 20 years to the life of existing copyrights. (The rule is now that
works created by individuals are protected for the individual's lifetime plus 70
years, and works created by corporations are protected for 95 years.)
Extending the life of copyright delays the transition of copyrighted works into
the public domain. Eldred's interest is that he maintains a web site of
free full-text books in the public domain.

You may not feel a threat to FOS in copyright extension. But think of
it this way. Mark Lemley, a lawyer for the Internet Archive, estimates
that without the Bono copyright extension, 9,853 out-of-print books published in
1930 could be put online with no permissions or royalties in 2005. If the
Bono Act is upheld, free online access to them will be blocked for another 20
years, perhaps longer if Congress extends copyright again in the future.
Further extensions are likely: Congress has extended the term of
copyrights 11 times in the last four decades.

Shrinking the public domain through retroactive copyright extension not
only harms the interests of readers, and the authors of derivative works, but
may violate the constitution's copyright clause, which allows Congress to create
copyrights that protect authors' rights "for limited times". Eldred will
also argue that retroactive copyright extension violates the First
Amendment.

Eldred lost in the lower courts. (See FOSN for 4/24/01, 7/31/01,
1/16/02.) Lawrence Lessig has been his lawyer, and will argue the case
before the Supreme Court. The Bush administration opposes Eldred and will
argue that the public's right to use content is satisfied by fair-use rights
under copyright law and is not harmed by a delayed transition into the public
domain.

The content industry, led by Disney, wants to keep its intellectual
property from entering the public domain for as long as possible, and will not
stop lobbying for further copyright extensions. The copyright on Mickey
Mouse would have expired in 2003, a calamity that many believe the Bono Act was
designed to avert. If true (as I said in a recent interview), this is a
"grotesque inversion of values".

* Postscript. Courts rarely face FOS issues directly. The
reason is simply that FOS isn't illegal and no bill or legislation I've ever
seen would outlaw it. But many acts of legislation have the potential to
slow it down, narrow its scope, or close off one of the many avenues it could
pursue. From this point of view, the Eldred case is among the most
important FOS cases yet brought to the Supreme Court, on a par with Tasini last
June.

FOS is entirely compatible with copyright as it is, and does not depend on
the public domain. Therefore, Eldred could go either way and many forms of
FOS would be completely unaffected. But this case matters for FOS because
the public domain is one very important avenue of FOS, even if not the only
one.

* A recent survey of chemists by DK Associates reveals that their most-used
online source of chemical information is ChemWeb, followed closely by Google
--two free sources. (PS: ChemWeb is owned by Elsevier but developed
by Current Science, the same people who developed BioMed Central. I'm not
surprised that Google is on the short list. I'd bet that similar surveys
in any other discipline would put Google in the top two or three. This is
remarkable since it is not optimized for scholarship and includes peer-reviewed,
unreviewed, and crank writings without discrimination. However, its sort
algorithm doesn't rank them equally. It uses the network of links as a
kind of communal peer review. Even though the peers in this network are
academics and non-academics, the algorithm still tends to make worthy work rise
higher in its sort list than unworthy work.)

* When the free online journals published by SciELO were included in ISI,
their visibility grew quickly. Researchers from Oxford University report
in the January 21 _Nature_, that the average impact factor of the SciELO
journals covered by ISI grew 133.7% since their inclusion. SciELO produces
scientific journals for Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
(PS: This shows that while open access increases visibility and impact,
recognition by channels already used and respected by scholars can boost
visibility and impact even further. Not a surprise but a reminder that
accessibility is necessary but not sufficient for impact.)

* The Krazsna-Krausz Moving Image Book Awards were awarded in London on
February 5. The two top prize-winners took home £5,000 each. They
were _Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His
Audiences_ by Perl Bowser and Louise Spece (Rutgers University Press) and
_Special Effects: The History and Technique_ by Richard Rickitt (Virgin Books
and Billboard Books).

* Douglas Rushkoff has found a print publisher for _Exit Strategy_, his
"open source" novel. The book was published online last July so that
readers could enlarge it with their own footnotes (FOSN for 11/26/01).
Soft Skull Press will soon publish the novel in print; the footnotes will stay
on the web, where they will continue to grow.

* The license agreement for Network Associates (NA) software prohibits the
publication of reviews of the software without the company's approval. New
York State is suing the company to remove the restrictive covenant from the
license. NA says it only wants to make sure that reviewers are evaluating
the newest versions of its products. (PS: This case raises some deep
questions. Clearly users have a right to review NA software without
approval, at least until they consent to waive this right. Is it about
time to say that tearing open shrink-wrap is not a valid manifestation of
consent? If consent to licensing terms can waive rights created by
copyright law, such as fair use, does it follow that it can waive fundamental
free speech rights as well? If so, should NY stay out of the picture and
let users decide when to waive their rights? Could a journal publisher add
a similar covenant to the license it offers to libraries? Could
institutional consent to such a license bind all the employees of the
institution?)

* SightSound Technologies has won a court decision that it owns the patent
on downloading music and video. (PS: What is disturbing about this
judgment is not that it thwarts the Napster movement, which is not relevant to
FOS, but that a company could patent the downloading of music and video.
If this can be patented, why not the downloading of text? The wires don't
know and don't care how humans interpret the bits. The decision is also
disturbing because it will hinder FOS as scholars learn to take better advantage
of the internet as a medium of scholarship and, at least in some fields,
increasingly rely on multi-media to report their research results.)

* Bentham Science Publishers is offering free online access to all of its
2000 and 2001 journals during 2002, but only during 2002. Access is
through ingenta. (PS: What's going on here? A year from now,
will Bentham really see enough revenue in these back issues to reinstate price
limitations on access?)

* Oregon State University is scanning Linus Pauling's notebooks and putting
the images online free of charge. The collection will include notebooks
from 1922 to 1994, and should be complete on February 28. Since the OSU
story says nothing about payment, I assume Pauling's estate donated these
papers, unlike Francis Crick, who got $2.5 million for his (see FOSN for
12/26/01, 1/1/02). Linus Pauling was the only man to win two unshared
Nobel prizes (Chemistry in 1954, Peace in 1962). He died in 1994.

* Version 41 of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Scholarly Electronic Publishing
Bibliography is now online. The new edition cites more than 1,550
articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources on the publication of
online scholarship.

* The text-e online seminar has moved on to a new text, "The New
Architecture of Information" by Stephana Broadbent and Francesco Cara.
This paper will be the subject of the online discussion until February 28.

* The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia has
released a Research Support Tool (RST) to accompany content posted to its online
publishing system. When users pull up an article, the RST will
automatically create a sidebar of links to useful auxiliary information.
There is a working demo at the site. The RST has been implemented so far
only for the field of education, but it will soon extend to other
disciplines.

* There's an interesting discussion now taking place on ERIL-L (Electronic
Resources in Libraries) on the question whether library bibliographic records
should contain links to Amazon and other commercial bookstores so that
researchers can take advantage of their online reviews, tables of contents, and
other services, including of course the possibility of purchase.

* Peek-a-booty has finally launched. Peek-a-booty is a P2P program
for bypassing censorship imposed by governments, ISP's, employers, schools, or
libraries (see FOSN for 5/25/01, 7/10/01). It was supposed to launch in
July 2001, but was delayed to plug some security holes. Although it has
now launched, its developers say it won't be secure enough to use for another
six months. Peek-a-booty is especially promising because the previous
leader in this niche, SafeWeb, recently removed its free service from the web,
at least temporarily (FOSN for 9/21/01, 11/26/01).

* In the March issue of the _MIT Technology Review_, Wade Rousch asks
whether we are witnessing the death of digital rights management. The
question doesn't arise because content companies are abandoning DRM in favor of
free online access, but because the DRM providers are slashing their workforces
and going out of business. Rousch's diagnosis: partly the dot-com
recession, partly "technological shortcomings" of DRM (some which hurt the
provider, some which hurt the reader or consumer), partly a shortage of paying
customers for DRM-protected online content, partly a shake-out and consolidation
of the DRM manufacturers. I sense another factor implicit in Rousch's
discussion: corporate indecision about what the software should do,
that is, how much it should alienate users in order to protect providers.

* Also in the March _MIT Technology Review_, Seth Shulman reports on the
November 9-11 conference on the public domain at Duke University (FOSN for
11/26/01). What makes the conference notable for Shulman is the way it
brought different kinds of intellectual property (IP) activists together the way
the environmental movement brought different kinds of environmental activists
together. Once we realized that environmental issues were interwoven,
groups that differed in focus or emphasis had good reasons to work
together. IP activists are now coming to the same realization.
"These issues are interwoven because they all involve balancing similar kinds of
private and public needs in a knowledge-based economy. And yet, the
various parties -—from the League for Programming Freedom to the American
Library Association-— have tended to work in isolation on their own narrow sets
of issues. But the parochialism is fading as parties learn they’re arguing
about the same issues. Which is why the Duke meeting could go down as a
watershed: it marked the start of an organized movement to protect the
conceptual commons."

* In the March issue of _Cites & Insights_, Walt Crawford responds to
the Theodore Zeldin and Jason Epstein symposium papers at Text-e. (He
responded to four other Text-e symposium papers in the February issue.) He
also evaluates the last 2001 issue of _Library Hi Tech_, which is devoted to
ebooks, and has kind words for FOSN, saying it "provides a fine mix of personal
commentary and annotated links." Thanks, Walt.

* In a guest editorial in the March issue of _New Architect_, John Perry
Barlow interprets the current state of copyright law. "[J]ust as sharing
makes us civilized, it's sharing that makes civilization....I know that this is
a fairly obvious observation. That's why I'm stunned that so many kinds of
sharing have suddenly, without public debate, become criminal acts. For
instance, lending a book to a friend is still all right, but letting him read
the same book electronically is now a theft." In discussing the DeCSS and
Felten cases: "Suddenly, it's as though there is no difference between
discussing murder and committing it."

* In a February 21 posting to _WoPEc_ (of a July 2001 paper), Robert Parks
argues that not even free online journals will solve the serials crisis because
free online journals will not give authors an incentive to submit their works to
them rather than to the priced journals. He doesn't predict that FOS will
fail to materialize, only that at best it will co-exist with priced
journals. Some of his arguments are very weak: authors don't really
want more readers, because this costs them additional time in responding to
their queries. When editorial boards resign to create FOS journals, they
are replaced. Readers don't care whether journals cost a lot of money
provided their institutions pay the costs. (PS: Parks gives many reasons
to think that incentives to use priced journals might persist. But he does
very little to show that these incentives are strong, durable, or weightier than
contrary incentives. Author incentives are an important problem for
FOS. But all the indicia of significance and prestige can belong to FOS
journals, even if cultivating them takes time. And already FOS journals
give authors a larger audience, superior visibility, and greater impact, which
are overriding incentives for a growing number of authors.)

* In a February 18 article in the _New York Times_, Sarah Milstein
describes the rise of a defensive intellectual property tactic: instead of
obtaining patents or copyrights, putting the ideas into the public domain so
that competitors cannot patent or copyright them. (PS: When
self-interest joins good policy, good policy is sure to prevail.)

* In the February 17 _New York Times_, William Broad reports on steps taken
by the Bush administration to block public access to ever larger bodies of
scientific knowledge in order to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

* In a February 18 _CNN_ story, Scarlet Pruitt reviews recent DMCA
litigation for the general public, including the Sklyarov and Felten
cases. This is a good introduction to the many problems identifiefd in the
DMCA.

("Sustained testing of the OAI protocol seems a logical and sensible
research initiative that will bring us closer to making the rich information
resources museums hold more widely available to researchers and other
users.")

Monica Segbert, "[Digital Library] News from the Russian State
Library"

(A good introduction to this important program and some related programs
with which it achieves synergy. "There are many projects supported by the
European Union that can and could use the network created through the eIFL
network to transfer knowledge and research results, enable closer networking
with institutions in the EU, and aid capacity building pioneered in the 10 years
of OSI operations in the region.")

* In a position paper presented at the NSF Workshop on Open Source Software
(last revised 2/4/02), Walt Scacchi explores the "processes, practices, and
communities that give rise to open source software". Scacchi makes
cultural observations about open source developers that transfer well to the
scholars in the FOS movement. For example: "[O]pen source developers
appear to have a unique work culture including priorities such as seeking the
truth, developing a professional reputation through software development,
believing in the value of free software, and pursuing their own preferences in
work." Scacchi points out that physicists are more likely to believe that
open source software advances research than scientists in genomics and other
fields closely tied to potential patents.

* In a recent working paper posted to Indiana University's Center for
Social Informatics, Rob Kling and two co-authors describe what they call "Guild
Publishing" as a fifth model of free online scholarly publishing, after
ejournals, hybrid paper-electronic journals, authors posting to their own web
sites, and self-archiving to institutional or disciplinary archives. Guild
Publishing is the free online dissemination of working papers or technical
reports sponsored by academic departments or research institutes. For
example, all major U.S. computer science departments, and 250 others around the
world, sponsor research manuscript series, as do all major research institutes
of high energy physics. Kling and his co-authors enumerate six advantages
of Guild Publishing: local control, ease of innovation, quality control
through "career review" (based on the reputation of the department or
institute), accessibility, economy, and compatibility with other publishing
models. They also list three disadvantages.

* In another recent working paper posted to IU's CSI, Rob Kling traces the
evolution of E-Biomed into PubMed Central. He studies postings to
discussion lists and concludes that Harold Varmus' original idea for E-Biomed
responded to criticism and objections raised by publishers and scientific
societies. An incidental conclusion of some weight is that "scientific
societies and individual scientists they represent do not always have identical
interests, especially in regards to scientific e-publishing".

* In a January 15 story in _UPI_, Sam Vaknin explores the future of
electronic publishing, commercial publishers' clumsy embrace of the internet,
and the prospect that priced online content can attract a paying audience.
He predicts that online commercial publishing will start to flourish "as
hardware improves and becomes ubiquitous, as content becomes more attractive, as
more versatile information taxonomies are introduced, as the Internet becomes
more gender-neutral, polyglot, and cosmopolitan....This renaissance will
probably be aided by the gradual decline of print magazines and by a
strengthening movement for free open source scholarly publishing."

* In the January issue of the _Journal of the Medical Library Association_,
Rollo Turner explains why electronic journals have not reduced journal prices or
simplified licensing contracts. (PS: The good news is that most of
the costs Turner identifies for ejournals exist only for priced journals that
want to restrict access to paying customers.)

* In a December 10 article in _The Scientist_, Isaac Ginsburg argues that
the tendency to disregard older research literature is a threat to honest
science. He enumerates several causes for this "Disregard Syndrome".
Not on his list, but implicit in his discussion of the "pre-Medline era", is the
tendency of researchers to prefer the convenience of free online searches to the
inconvenience of paper searches, even if free online searches are limited in
scope to recent literature. (PS: True. We just have to be
careful not to confuse the solution with the problem. The solution is to
extend the convenience of FOS to more of scientific literature, not to retreat
from this convenience. For more, see my comments on the death of Ellen
Roche in FOSN for 8/23/01.)

* California Supreme Court will hear the Bunner appeal, the state-court
version of the DeCSS case (see FOSN for 12/5/01). Bunner won a lower-court
decision that the First Amendment gave him the right to publish the DeCSS source
code for bypassing copy-protection on DVD's.